Mahouka Koukou no Yuutousei Episode 3 Discussion

sirmattis said:
What a funny episode.. sort of. For me the best part was when Mayumi and Mari were mocking Tatsuya and Miyuki.

Chaosjash said:
Anime only watcher here. For the past 2 episodes, it seems like the focus has been more on Honoka and Shizuku. Is this gonna continue throughout the rest of the series, or will the POV properly shift back to Miyuki for the rest of the adaptation?

Lelouch0202 said:
Was Eimi in the mainline series? I seem to have no recollection of her. It's kinda weird to introduce her out of nowhere if she was never in the mainline anime, especially given that the story is being told from Miyuki's perspective from the beginning.

-Mahesvara said:
She was, she had multiple appearances in the nine schools competition arc back in the first season as she was one of the girls Tatsuya was in charge of during the event.

Lelouch0202 said:

I see, guess I just forgot completely. It's been ages since I saw that. My bad.

sirmattis said:
What a funny episode.. sort of. For me the best part was when Mayumi and Mari were mocking Tatsuya and Miyuki.

Chaosjash said:
Anime only watcher here. For the past 2 episodes, it seems like the focus has been more on Honoka and Shizuku. Is this gonna continue throughout the rest of the series, or will the POV properly shift back to Miyuki for the rest of the adaptation?

malMaxi said:

Won't deny it is weird :D. A lot of it was fueled by limitations rather than conscious choice.
On another hand, a lot of it was fueled by lack of limitations. For example, I am not sure how much of an issue were any sort of "rights", looking from the other side of the iron curtain.

malMaxi said:
Something similar in Russia as well. Well, given recent developments, i guess that "patriotic nationalistic" thing will change before too long.
Not sure how i feel about that. Was nice living in a global world while it lasted.

malMaxi said:

I agree that these seven story plots definitely do exist and thinking of their combinations is a good way to improve on stories.
I disagree that these are the only seven story plots that exist. For example, Mahouka's story (at least the part of it that works, which is until Tatsuya solves flying) is not really any of these (despite having aspects of all of these).

Where i draw the line is when adherents of such classifications say that something is a bad story - or not a story at all - just because it doesn't fit into classification.

Well, the true reason is of course that they dislike the story. Having a pretty good understanding of their own taste - having classified it and all - they are also pretty good at explaining why they specifically dislike the story. However, saying that it isn't a story or a bad story just because of that dislike is a step i'm not willing to take.

I do actually like early parts of Mahouka and think it is a good story, even if it doesn't neatly fit into the classification provided. In fact, it not fitting into popular classification is the exact thing that makes me return to it time and time again, despite the massive problems it has as a story starting with the sports festival arc.

malMaxi said:

Next episode is meh. They have some moments, but the story fabric has more or less unraveled and isn't coming together. It is more like a collection of individual moments right now.

malMaxi said:
This episode was really good as a collection of individual scenes: Miyuki flash freezing people and Mayumi ordering ramen were the standout ones for me. The horse thing was ridiculous, pointless and awesome :D. Also the three skirts spying was interesting from fanservice PoV.

There is obviously some plot going on. The story is less about that specific plot and more about girls bonding, though. Which is not bad in itself, i guess. That being said, since the show failed to really establish the girls as a group in ep.2 (and also because the group keeps receiving new members), the dynamic doesn't really click for me.

Better than ep.2, still worse than ep.1 imo, - but i can see how it would be better for people that were really put off by the date scene.

theGodde said:
I confess I'm not very up to date with the latest in Russian politics. Are they getting more/less restrictive?

I don't know about that. You could think of the first part of the story being "rags to riches" in the social sense. Tatsuya goes from being an unappreciated alpha chad male to an over-appreciated alpha chad male. From what I've seen of the bones of the overarching story, it appears the general story will be Tatsuya overcoming the confines of his current standing within the prestigious family Mayuki's sociopathic aunt controls (that I can barely remember the details so have mercy on me). So it's an "overcoming the monster" type story.

If you want to disprove a storytelling convention that has withstood thousands of years of challenges from people just like you, then you'd have to provide clear examples.
the reason why you think there are exceptions is because there are lots of stories with muddled or poorly communicated overarching plots where it becomes hard to identify the type of basic story it is.

We live in an age where all facts are considered opinions, and therefore you have to respect people whose "opinions" are different to yours. Different people enjoy different (and sometimes objectively bad) stories. That doesn't make those stories good. Because a good story is universally recognised as a story of high entertainment value and/or deep and thought provoking ideals. Something is considered high entertainment value when it contains aspects that we as a global society have considered universally entertaining. We as a species have lain down the standards for what makes a good story. I feel that as much as our modern society likes to question our foundations, this is something that will stand the test of time.

the issue with mahouka as a whole is that it goes a step below "average" shounen storytelling. While in a generic shounen anime, all the characters will be typical shounen archetypes and never stray out of those archetypes, in Mahouka the characters seem somewhat vaguely connected to a particular shounen archetype, but don't often act or even conform to that stereotype, and instead act as soulless vessels to deliver essential dialogue and progress the plot.
I can ignore a bad plot if I'm presented with good, likeable characters. Good characters make a series feel alive even if everything else isn't quite there. But Mahouka doesn't even have stereotypical characters, they have inconsistent, bland puppets that speak dialogue. This is the one thing that reduces my enjoyment of the series the most.
That's my take. In this case, I am being less objective and more subjective. Curious to see what your thoughts are on the matter.

malMaxi said:

Well, we already see bans on certain animes :D. ATM it is mostly stuff like Elfen Lied (too violent), Interspecies Reviewers (too sexual) or Death Note (anti-christian). But we also saw a ban on Konosuba, of all things (i couldn't parse the logic behind that one. Something like "making virtual reality too attractive").

At this moment these bans aren't really affecting anyone's consumption: these animes aren't really being consumed in Russia through any sort of official government channels, i haven't heard about attacks on any of russian-language streaming sites (Crunchyroll is fine) and we also have quite a rich history of piracy that is quite effective at rendering all attempts at censorship utterly fruitless, if not outright counterproductive. So i am not exactly worried about actual public access to these works.

But it is true that things are getting more restrictive.

malMaxi said:

Tatsuya is not in rags, so "rags to riches" doesn't really work.
"Overcoming the monster" would work, if Tatsuya himself wasn't a much bigger monster to begin with.

The sociopathic aunt doesn't factor into first season at all (and generally is not a factor in all currently adapted portions of the story, at least to my knowledge).

I am sure i can fit the classification onto this story with some trying (like, imagining that being the top military asset of a country all but married to the literal princess of the biggest clan is somehow "rags"). However, "suspension of disbelief" is a thing that applies not only to stories, but also to classifications. And, well, the extent to which i need to stretch the common "story archetypes" to fit Mahouka strains my personal suspension of disbelief when it comes to that classification a bit too much.

malMaxi said:
You have it a bit backwards. It is not on me to prove or disprove the convention. It is the convention that has to prove useful to me. The process of "standing the test of time" that you refer to is the process through which the convention proves useful generation after generation of creative people. And when it stops being useful, well that's when it stops standing the test of time.

The convention of "these types of stories are possible" has actually been useful to me. However, the part of it that says "there are ONLY these types of stories" has done more harm than good, from where i stand.

Mahouka stands as an example of a story that you need to bend over backwards to fit into the current convention.

Also, this convention didn't actually stand for "thousands of years". Slightly over two thousands of years ago, ancient greeks believed that there are only two types of story - comedy and tragedy (Mahouka would be "comedy" in that ancient classification). A bit later, they added a third type of story which is "drama" (at which point Mahouka would no longer fall under "comedy" and fall under "drama" instead).
Do note how they separated the stories in quite a different fashion than the convention you referenced entails.

The most recent iteration of story classification was popularized by Campbell's "A hero with a thousand faces" in 1949
EDIT: at the moment of first writing this post, i thought this was the classification you were talking about, but apparently it is something different. Either way, just goes to show that there are different ways of looking at stories.
EDIT 2: however, the notion of 36 dramatic situations is still barely a century old
EDIT 3: also do note that this only tells us about "dramatic" situations, not touching on "comedic" or "tragic". So, at its best, it can only claim a third of the scope of stories that ancient greeks understood.
EDIT 4: In that classification, i think Mahouka features "Enmity of Kin", "Revolt" and "Daring enterprise" most strongly on Tatsuya's side and could feature "Ambition" and "Obstacles to love" on Miyuki's side, if they didn't completely botch it in the current series :(
EDIT 5: I can't say any of the above encompasses what actually makes Mahouka interesting, though :(. These are, ultimately, only "situations", which can only serve as a vehicle for the story, not its purpose.


"Bad" and "good" are matters of opinion. If "objectively" means "regardless of opinion", then "Objectively bad" is an oxymoron.

I am not sure what you mean by "universally recognized".
Mahouka has high entertainment value and has already provoked a lot of thought between the two of us, regardless of what the "universal" chooses to "recognize".
On another hand, there are people that say that, say, "Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov is both boring and intellectually pointless. Does that disqualify it as "universally recognized"?
I was briefly confused by this conundrum, until i figured out that literally every time someone says "universally recognized", it means "universally recognized in the specific portion of the subculture to which i belong to and am able to articulate".

"We as a species" didn't lay down the standard. Your specific subculture may believe we did, but we did not. The current standard has been laid down by a very specific set of people during a very specific time in our history, existing in a very specific culture. And we get examples that don't neatly fit into that standard all the time.

The fact that the standard defends its position by calling the stories it can't parse "bad" and people who write these stories "underserving to be called writers" does not automatically means that the stories are bad or that the people writing them are not writers. It does, however, show a limitation of understanding embedded into the standard in question.

As for what will stand the test of time, i believe that we have, indeed, recognized several types of stories that work (including but not limited to "rags to riches" and "fighting against a monster"). The notion that these stories (and their combinations) work (if properly executed) will stand the test of time. What won't stand the test of time is the notion that these are all stories that can exist.

And it is just not my opinion, by the way. In my corner, i have people like Arthur C. Clarke:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

malMaxi said:

I already stated my thoughts on the matter above :D. There are good moments of characterization in ep.3, but there is no good ongoing narrative to inform our understanding of these characters. They had a good thing going for Miyuki in ep.1, but right now it is lost.

As such, i agree that the characters can't help but appear cardboard. They only get to show a single side of their personality (because showing multiple sides requires a narrative, that is absent in the current series).

An interesting point of discussion here would be something like "What is required of the narrative in order for characters to be good?" and "What is a relationship between a narrative, a plot and a story and how does it impact characters?". Consider Lucky Star, where there is very little plot and story, but there are definitely strong characters and (what i personally parse as) a powerful narrative informing those characters.

On another hand, consider something like Fairy Tail, where characters are basically entirely carried by a story full of shounen tropes (as well as actually pretty good visual design), with characters having little to no individual substance beyond their immediate portrayals, and no real development to speak of (outside of an occasional villain heel face turn).

theGodde said:
I think the reason behind konosuba was that it promoted suicide - in which I've heard (you probably know more than I) that the Russian media takes suicide-related material incredibly seriously. TBH it's probably a dumb excuse made by some idiot who doesn't understand the subject matter they're looking into.

I was initially confused why you took what I said so literally, perhaps it's a translation/cultural barrier.
Either way I was interpreting "rags to riches" in its most basic sense as going from an "unfavourable" position to a "favourable" position and then applying it to mahouka and saying Tatsuya is going from a "weed" who is looked down upon to a disciplinary officer who everyone respects as a super epic chad. A lot of the fun from the earlier storylines came from people looking down on him and him proving them wrong until there was no one left in the school to look down on him anymore. So in my head it makes sense.

ngl you have overwhelmed me with facts and logic I was not aware of. I don't like to be the kind of guy to obstinately stick to a point they don't have any foundation to support, so I am more than willing to retract my previous statements on this matter.

Stating the convention has to prove useful to you is rather strange to me, as you have confessed you are not a writer, and therefore are not using the convention to write stories, only classify existing ones.

I would like to however pose some questions to you in response.
for one, can you truly claim that these conventions have simply stopped standing the test of time because a lot of people who were educated in them started writing shitty stories? I would lean more to the correlation vs causation. If anything, the opposite may be true. Perhaps it is the ignorance of the current generation to the evolution of storytelling that may be prompting an entire generation of mediocre stories?

I must admit myself ignorant of a lot of the dramatic situations and history (you can consider my previous statements as more of a self criticism than anything else lmao). However I find it easiest to classify something when I myself have reduced it down to its most simplistic level. Let's take Mobile Suit Gundam (which I recently finished). How would I summarise it in a single sentence - the story of a child being forced into a deadly situation and through it becoming a mature adult. Amuro, the protagonist, starts off as a whiny kid who is swept up into a galactic war, his home destroyed. By the end he becomes badass space Jesus who basically uses the force to obliterate his opponents. It's a typical coming of age story in a sci-fi war setting. The story has aspects of the "daring enterprise" as they are trying to win the war. Amuro's rivalry against Char is certainly the "rivalry of the superior and inferior". Char's individual motivation is definitely "Vengeance for a Crime", that slowly evolves to become something else and then returns to that aspect by the end. There's also "an enemy loved" aspect to another major plotline. However due to the various individual plot strands basically every different dramatic element has been featured in MSG

you certainly have a low bar as far as characterisation goes. While I will agree that conflict is essential to revealing and developing character, I would not say there is a lack of conflict in these past 3 episodes. If you want a good example of a bland or boring story with fascinating characters that elevate it, look no further than Cowboy Bebop. Most of the show is composed of "filler" episodes that don't advance the main plot, and in some there isn't even any real antagonistic force. However it's always supported by incredibly strong and well developed characters. Even if you completely ignored the entire plot, keeping even the smallest of plot details as they are, and simply focused on more deeply developing the characters, giving them more consistent and interesting characterisation, the quality of the show would skyrocket.

malMaxi said:

The official complaint was "attractiveness of life after death". Now that you tied that notion to suicide, it does actually make sense.

That feeling when some random internet person from Australia is better at explaining your own government's position than government itself :D

malMaxi said:
As for the specifics of my actual job, i'll leave to your imagination :D

It might be surprising for you to consider that the convention also had to prove useful to you (and i guess in your case it did so successfully). And it has to prove useful to every single person who creates stories. I'm just one brushstroke on that picture.
My particular brushstroke, however, just happens to be a rather dissatisfied with current state of things shade of red. And i would do a disservice to my painter if i pretended to be any other colour.

malMaxi said:

Lucky Star is in no shape, way or form a low bar for characterization.
There is a reason why it is a classic.

Fairy Tail is a low bar, but i brought it up exactly as an example of bad characterization through writing, where the characters are basically being dragged forward by the plot.

You are correct in bringing up Cowboy Bebop as a great example of what i'm trying to get at, but i don't think it is correct to describe any of it as "filler". It is "episodic", but literally not a single one of the episodes is "filler", at least not in the, say, "gurren lagann bath episode" sense. Every single episode in CB serves its narrative, which is all about the loneliness of space vagabonds.

Actually, now that i think about it, maybe i'm confusing you with the use of term "narrative"? Now that i think of it, my use of that term has more to do with Toynbee's culturology than with any writing conventions. Did i make a clear enough distinction between the concepts of "plot", "story" and "narrative"? Maybe it would be better if we picked a different term for what i'm trying to describe as "narrative" going forward?

"There are good moments of characterization in ep.3, but there is no good ongoing narrative to inform our understanding of these characters"

theGodde said:
how mysterious

(I had originally quoted a passage from you for this, but I realised my rant had no real relation to it so I'll just leave it here as is)
the vast amount of "New York Times Bestsellers" I've read came across like bad fanfiction. If there is one thing that I would say most modern writers are lacking, it is a passion for the medium. I read these books and I feel like I'm watching a novice writer describe the movie they're watching. A lot of modern writers don't seem to understand that books and movies have different writing conventions. I often feel like I'm reading a bad movie script that was paraphrased into a story. So to summarise the general problem I have with many modern authors is the lack of experience reading actual books. Steven King himself said that television was the worst thing to happen to the writing world.

When it comes to anime, I would refer to the Hollywood effect - it's become all about money, loss of artistic integrity, etc. etc. Whenever I see an anime that takes risks, it is often lacking in vision and script quality. A recent example would be Jouran: Princess of Snow and Blood. A show with a new and unique concept where the main arc wrapped up 4 episodes in and the rest of the story was a meandering and unguided mess. Going back to last year another potential masterpiece was Akudama Drive. However the world wasn't properly set up so a lot of the stakes felt contrived, bordering on nonsensical at times.
I can't say I follow much manga or LNs. However the jump manga Spy X Family gives me hope that new and unique stories can still be told.

Overall, I would say that there are many unique stories still being told, however many of the more firmly established media industries are beginning to feel the dead weight that has built up over time. Many industries (especially hollywood) need to begin to reinvent themselves again. Experiment and return to their roots.

I was referring to your statement on the episode, not lucky star. Because whether you love or hate the comedy, you need particularly strong characterisation to pull off a slice of life show.
the actual episode 3 comment I was responding to was
which is why I was trying to argue that mahouka had enough narrative to set up good characterisation. But there just wasn't any.

While I would agree that each episode informs us on a different facet of the bebop crew's characterisation, strictly speaking there are many episodes that could be removed and have no affect on the plot. Take the Alien spoof, where spike leaves something to rot in the fridge and it evolves into a sentient being that starts picking off the crew. Or the cowboy episode, where some rich guy poses as a real cowboy bounty hunter until he's scared off by the dangers of the bounty hunting profession. Neither episode add anything to the main plot, but you could argue they are essential in informing us of the characters.
While you have correctly identified the main theme of cowboy bebop, the plot is Tarantino esq gangster story. Spike is roaming the galaxy on the Bebop in search of his love, Julia; meanwhile Vicious is scheming mercilessly simply to amuse himself while he waits for a final confrontation between him and Spike.
Most of the episodes add little to the main story, which is why it is somewhat difficult to identify, but this is part of the charm of the show. The absence of main plot adds to the themes of the story.

As for narrative, I use the word story interchangeably with the concept you're talking about. I suppose what we both mean in a sense is the experience of the show/media. The "overall package".